Der Kampf um den Südpol / The Battle for the South Pole

Stefan Zweig, 1927. Translated by DS Thorne

Introduction

The Battle for the South Pole is chapter 12 of Stefan Zweig's 1927 work Sternstunden der Menschheit, a collection of historical miniatures which, some momentous and some obscure, put the full and fickle drama of man's lot on display. I have always loved Zweig's prose style for its lucidity, its urbanity, its verve. And here we have a dazzling specimen of it, indulgent, to be sure, even to the point of falsifying the entire tone of Scott's diary, turning high adventure into melodrama. But then life is short, and I am hard-pressed to think of another author who makes the German language sound so good.

For the translator Zweig has its own particular difficulties above and beyond those of transplanting the Germanophone's approach to formulating thought into foreign soil. And of these there certainly are enough: what do we do with Scham in "Jungfräulich und rein trotzt ihre Scham der Neugier der Welt?" "Shame" misses the point, and "pubic area" takes the metaphor in too clinical a direction. I went with "honor", letting "virginal" take care of the sexual undertone: "Pure and virginal, her honor defies the curiosity of the world." Other such instances abound.

The term "Sternstunden" itself, though not Zweig's own coinage (it dates from the 1800's) is one he popularized. It confounds easy translation of the book's title, which may in part explain why the it never really caught on among English-speaking readers. The hyper-literal Star-hours of Humanity hardly cuts it, nor do the other proposed titles. Decisive Moments of History is simply wrong: the whole point of telling Scott's failed expedition is to show the tragedy of how world-historical significance, for all of his fierce resolve, eluded him. And The Tide of Fortune: Twelve Historical Miniatures, though accurate, wanders far afield. One (presumed) neologism in this text deserves attention.Griffnah (literally: "grip-near") in "so griffnah vom Ziel umkehren zu müssen" took some close consideration, and I finally hit upon "to turn back now with the quarry so close at hand". In introducing "quarry" and swapping out "goal" or "destination" I took a modest liberty. But I would say this is entirely in keeping with Zweig's spirit: throughout his works accuracy plays second fiddle to effect.

Which brings us to one last matter: how do you handle retranslating Zweig's translations of Scott's diary back into English, when Zweig has taken the great liberties he has? For example, in his entry from January 14, 1912 Scott writes: "Meanwhile we are less than 40 miles from the Pole." Zweig renders this: "Nur noch 70 Kilometer, das Ziel liegt vor uns!" I fail to find any trace of that second clause anywhere in Scott's entry. And on January 15 Scott writes: “Only 27 miles from the Pole. We ought to do it now”, which Zweig translates as "Nur noch lumpige 50 Kilometer, wir müssen hinkommen, koste es, was es wolle!" Translating this back into English, we get something more like: "Only a measly 50 kilometers, we have to make it whatever the cost!" In the interest of keeping Zweig's tone and momentum, I have decided to try to keep to his version of the diary as much as possible. Comparison with the actual diary, like comparison of the entire story with the original events, has to remain a separate effort.

As a challenge to myself, and in an effort to make this translation as fresh as possible, I have avoided consulting any English editions of this work.

The twentieth century looks down upon a world bereft of secrets. Every land has been explored; many hulls have plowed the farthest seas. Landscapes that only a generation ago still lay in blissful, free anonymity are now slaves to Europe's hunger. The steamer presses even to the long-sought source of the Nile; the Victoria Falls, glimpsed for the first time by Europeans only half-a century ago, obediently grind out electrical power; that final wilderness, the jungles of the Amazon River, has been illuminated; the chaste belt of the last untried country, Tibet, has been undone. Those words we know from old maps and globes, "Terra incognita", have been written over by knowing hand, and so the man of the twentieth century has found his place. Yet the will to explore seeks new paths; it must dive down to the fantastical fauna of the ocean's deep or ascend the endless skies. For only in the heavens can we still find an untrammeled way — but already airplanes struggle upwards on their metal pinions, each against the other, to achieve new height and range, since curiosity for things of the earth has gone fallow and disenchanted.

But one last riddle has hidden the world's most private regions from the eye of man even into our century, has preserved two tiny parts of her lacerated and tortured body from the rapacity of her own creations. South Pole and North Pole, the backbone of her body — these two points, which though almost without weight and substance form the axis around which she has turned through the ages — these she has preserved pure and inviolate. She has pushed hulks of ice before this last secret, an endless winter to hold out the plunderers. Frost and Storm imperiously surround the entrance, horror and danger ward off the bold adventurer with threats of death. Of these impregnable spheres man sees nothing, and even the sun gets no more than a fleeting glance.

For decades the expeditions have followed one upon the other. Not one of them achieves its goal. Somewhere, just now discovered after thirty three years, the boldest of the bold lies in a crystalline sarcophagus of ice: Andrees, who set out to sail his balloon over the Pole and never made it back. Every new assault shatters against the blank walls of frost. For millenia and up until our times the earth, here and for the last time, veils her countenance from the ardor of her creations. Pure and virginal, her honor defies the curiosity of the world.

But the young twentieth century cannot hold back its impatient hands. It has forged new weapons in laboratories, devised new armor against peril. Every obstacle only serves to whet its appetite. It seeks to know every truth; in just its very first decade it seeks to conquer things denied to every age before. The rivalry of nations compounds each man’s courage. No more do they just fight over the Pole, but over who should plant the first flag to fly over this newest world: a new crusade of races and peoples raises up to claim the site hallowed by their longing. From every corner of the earth the assault begins anew. Impatiently mankind waits, for it knows that this counts as the last secret of its dominion. From America Peary and Cook arm themselves against the North Pole; southward sail two ships, one under the command of Amundsen the Norwegen, the other under Captain Scott of England.

Scott

Scott: Yet another captain in the English Navy, his biography no different than the others. He served to the satisfaction of his superiors, and after that took part in Shackleton’s expedition. No special marker points this hero the way. The photographs show his face to be that of a thousand Englishmen, of ten thousand, cold, vital, without any play of muscles, frozen as it were from inward driven forces. The eyes a steely grey; the mouth firmly shut. Nowhere a trace of romance, not a glimmer of cheer in this gaze of will and action. His handwriting: distinguished in no way from that of any other English hand, without nuance or flourish, quick and assured. His style: clear and correct and, though riveting in content, straightforward like a report. Scott writes English like Tacitus writes Latin, forming thoughts as if from unhewn stones. We get the impression of a man entirely without dreams, a man of fanatical detachment, that is, a man after the true English manner, in whom even genius expresses itself with a cold and heightened sense of duty. This same Scott has lined the pages of English history a hundred times already, he conquered India and the nameless islands of the archipelago, he colonized Africa and did battle against the world, always with the same iron force, the same collective mind and the same cold and unwavering look.

How hard this will, like steel! That was clear even before his great feat. Scott seeks to finish what Shackleton began. He outfits for an expedition but comes up short. This does not stop him. He burns his assets and piles on debt, so sure he is of success. His young wife presents him with a son, and he, another Hector, does not hesitate to leave Andromache behind. He soon finds friends and companions; no earthly power can bend his will now. “Terra Nova” he calls the strange ship that is to bring them as far as the sea of ice. Strange its provisions, one part Noah’s Arch full or living creatures, and one part modern laboratory with a thousand instruments and books. For into this blank and unpopulated world they must bring everything they need for mind and body. Strange it is to see these things — primitive weapons of cavemen, hides and furs, living animals — lie together with the newest refinements of complex modern equipment. And fantastical how this ship, too, bears the image of the Janus-faced venture: daring indeed, but calculated like a business; audacious, but with every artful caution; infinite in the painstaking calculus it sets against a stronger infinity of chance.

On July 1, 1910 they leave England. In this season the Anglo-Saxon island kingdom bathes in light. The meadows blossom tender and green, the warm sun gazes over the unmisted world. With distress they feel the coast recede, for they all know, all of them, that they are taking leave warmth and sunshine for years, and some perhaps forever. But atop the ship flies the English flag and they console themselves with the thought that they are accompanied by a world-historical import to the last unruled stretch of the conquered Earth.

In January, following a short rest, they land at Cape Evans, New Zealand, at the edge of the eternal ice, and prepare a house to spend the winter. December and January are summer there, because only then does the sun shine upon the white, metallic skies. The walls are made of wood, just as in their previous expeditions, but inside the world’s progress has set foot. While their predecessors had sat in the dim light and stench of smoldering fish-oil laps, weary of their own faces, worn down by the monotony of the sunless days, these men of the twentieth century have the entire world, the entirety of science compressed within their four walls. An acetylene lamp sheds warm, white light, film projectors conjure up images of distant places, tropical scenes from mild climes, a pianola brings them music, the gramophone the human voice, the library the knowledge of their times. In one room the typewriter hammers away, another serves as a dark room for developing moving and colored pictures. The geologist tests the rock for radioactivity, the zoologist discovers new parasites on penguins they have caught, meteorological observations trade off with physical experiments; everyone has work enough for months of darkness and a clever system transforms solitary research into communal enrichment. For these thirty men give lectures every evening, university courses in pack ice and arctic frost. Everyone seeks to pass his knowledge on. In lively exchange they expand their understanding of the world. Here specialized research dispenses with its pride and seeks to be commonly understood. All alone amidst the primitive and timeless elements thirty men exchange the latest findings of the twentieth century with each other, but inside the hours and indeed the very seconds of history’s clock are heard. How moving it is to read how these diligent men find pleasure in the Christmas party and in the wit of the “South Polar Times”, the newspaper they produce for fun, how the “Little One” — a young whale that surfaces and dives — becomes a sensation and, on the other hand, how dreadful things — the Northern lights, the terrible frost, the expansive isolation — become everyday and ordinary.

Now and again they hazard the outdoors. They test out their motorized sleds, they learn to ski, they train the dogs. The provision a depot for the great journey — but slowly, so slowly do the days pass until December, until the summer that is to bring them, through the pack ice, the ship bearing letters from home. Already in the midst of the harrowing winter small groups risk day excursions, hardening themselves against the elements, testing the tents, gathering experience. Not everything works, but it is precisely the difficulties that toughen their resolve. When they return from their expedition, frozen and exhausted, they are welcomed by cheers and the warm light of the oven, and nothing in the world could seem so serene and restful as this cozy little house at the 77th parallel.

At one point, however, an expedition returns from the west, and their report casts a hush over the camp. In the course of their wanderings they have discovered Amundsen's winter quarters, and now Scott suddenly is aware that something besides the frost and danger threatens the fame he would have in being the first to wrest secrets from the defiant earth: Amundsen, the Norwegian. He takes measurements at the maps, and one can practically feel the horror leap from the pages of his diary when he becomes aware that Amundsen's winter camp lies 68 miles closer to the Pole than his. He is startled, but does not lose heart. "Onwards, for the glory of my country!", he proudly writes.

Only once does the name Amundsen show up in the pages of his diary, and never again. But it is evident: from that day on a fearful shadow lies over the lonesome house, surrounded by ice. And from that point there is not an hour that this name does not invade his sleep and waking.

A mile from the cabin, atop the hill used for observations, a constant watch is kept. An instrument has been set up there, lonely atop the steep elevation, like a canon against an invisible enemy: an instrument for tracking the warmth that will indicate the sun’s approach. For days they await this sign. Above, though the heavens dawn in marvelous, glowing colors, the orb of the sun itself does not yet appear above the horizon. Still the sky, filled with the magical light of the sun’s proximity, reflecting its brilliance in anticipation, is enough to fill the impatient men with enthusiasm. At last the phone call from the promontory arrives and the camp is overjoyed: the sun has appeared; for the first time in months it has lifted its head into the winter night. It shimmers pale and weak, scarcely capable of animating the icy air, its waves scarcely touching the instrument. But the mere sight of it spreads happiness all around. Feverishly and restlessly the expedition makes its preparations in order to make use of the brief sunlight that counts spring, summer and fall as one — though for us, with our mild conception of life, they would still seem a horrifying winter. The motorized sleds race ahead. Behind them the sleds with Siberian ponies and dogs. The way has been cautiously broken up into stages. Every two days of travel a depot is set up to stockpile new clothing, food and, most importantly, petroleum for the return journey: a compact store of warmth against the endless frost. The entire troupe sets out together to return gradually in individual groups, in this way leaving the majority of the cargo, the freshest draft animals and the best sleds to the anointed conquerors of the Pole.

The plan is masterfully conceived. Even mishaps are anticipated in detail. Nothing is omitted. After two days of travel the motorized sleds break down and remain there like unused ballast. Nor do the ponies fare so well as expected. But in this case the organic triumphs over the technological, for the expired ponies that have been shot along the way give the dogs a welcome ration of hot and bloody nourishment, renewing their vigor.

On the first on November, 1911, they break up into individual troupes. In the photos we see the surreal caravan of first thirty, then twenty, then ten and at last only five men wander through the white desert of a lifeless world. Always at the front a man mummified in furs and blankets, a barbaric and wild being, whose beard and eyes alone peek forth from his entrapment. His fur-clad hand holds the halter of a pony that draws his heavy laden sled, and behind it another man, similarly clothed and postured, and behind him yet another, twenty black dots in a row trekking through an endless blinding whiteness. At night they bundle themselves up in tents, trenches are dug in the snow to protect the ponies against the wind, and in the morning the march begins again, monotonous and unconsoling, through an icy air which for the first time in millennia drinks of human breath.

But the worries increase. The weather remains inclement; sometimes instead of forty kilometers they can only cover thirty. Every day is a precious thing, since they know that somewhere in this lonesomeness another man invisibly approaches the same goal from the other side. The trivial becomes dangerous. A dog has escaped, a pony refuses to eat: all of this is unnerving, because here in the barrenness the value of things mutates terribly. Every living thing hear gains a thousand times in value, indeed becomes irreplaceable. Immortality itself may hang upon the hooves of a single pony, storm clouds can thwart success for all eternity. And now the men’s health begins to suffer; some have become snow-blind, others have frostbitten limbs; the ponies, whose rations have to be cut back, grow weary and finally, just before the Beardmore Glacier, collapse. The wrenching duty must be carried out: these valiant animals who, over the course of two years of companionship have become friends, whom everyone knows by name and showered a hundred times with affection, must be shot. “Camp Slaughterhouse”, they call the sad place. At this bloody juncture one part of the expedition breaks off and turns back. The others now prepare for the final push, for the cruel way over the glacier, the dangerous wall of ice surrounding the Pole, which can only be smashed with the ardor of man’s will.

Progress becomes slower and slower, for here the snow is grainy and encrusted. It is no longer a matter of pulling the sleds but dragging them laboriously. Hardened, the ice cuts into the runners; loose and sand-like it rubs feet raw. But they do not succumb. On December 30th they reach the 87th parallel, Shackleton’s farthest point. The last division has to turn back now--only five select men may push onwards to the Pole. Scott decides who to discharge. They don’t dare object, but how heavy their hearts are to turn back now with the quarry so close at hand, to leave to their companions the glory of being first to see the Pole. But the die is cast. They shake hands one last time, straining manfully to conceal their tender emotions, and then the group breaks off. Two small, tiny processions set out, one southward to the unknown, the other northward and homeward. From here and yonder they cast their glances back to each other, again and again, to feel the presence of their friends and comrades. Soon the last figure is lost from sight. All alone the five elect move onward into the unknown to finish the deed: Scott, Bowers, Oates, Wilson und Evans.

The diary entries grow more restless in these final days, just like the blue needle of the compass they begin to tremble with the nearness of the Pole. “How endlessly long it takes for the shadows to crawl around us, to budge from our right side forward and then from there to creep to our left!” But hope flickers intermittently and ever brighter. With ever greater fervency Scott records the distances conquered. “Only 93 miles to the Pole; at this rate we won’t endure it” — in such way their exhaustion is given voice. And two days thereafter: “85 miles to the Pole, but they will be punishing.” But then suddenly a new, more triumphant tone: “Only 51 miles from the Pole to-night. If we don’t get to it we shall be damn close.” On 14 January hope becomes certainty: “Only 40 miles, the goal is just ahead!” And on the next day cheer and even merriment blaze forth from the diary: "Only a measly 50 kilometers, we have to make it whatever the cost!" In these animated lines you can see into their hearts, how taught the chords of hope have been drawn, how everything in their nerves quakes with anticipation and impatience. The plunder is hard by, and already they stretch their hands toward the Earth’s last secret. One final push and they will have reached their destination.

“High spirits”, the diary announces. In the morning they have set out earlier than usual. Impatience has torn them from their sleeping bags in order to earlier behold the secret, the fearful wonder. The steadfast men cover eight and a half miles by noon, cheerfully marching through the soulless white desert. There is no way they can fail now, the epoch-making feat for mankind is all but accomplished. Suddenly one of the companions, Bowers, grows impatient. His eye is transfixed by a small, dark point in the monstrous field of snow. He doesn’t dare put words to his suspicion, but now the same terrible thought shudders in every heart: it may be that a signpost has already been erected here by the hand of man. With strained effort they try to remain calm. They tell themselves — as when Robinson tries in vain to call the stranger’s footprint on the island his own — this has to be a fissure in the ice, or a reflection. The march closer with twitching nerves, still trying to maintain the illusion although the truth is perfectly clear, that Amundsen the Norwegian has beat them to it.

Soon every doubt is dashed against the stark reality of the black flag, which has been raised on a sled’s runner over the traces of a foreign and abandoned camp. Sled marks and the imprints of many dogs’ paws — Amundsen had camped here. The terrible and incomprehensible has come to pass among men: the earth’s Pole, uninhabited for aeons, for aeons and perhaps even since the creation unseen by earthly eye—has been discovered twice within but a molecule of time, within fifteen days. And they are the second — of all these millions of months a single one too late — the second in all of human history for which it is everything to be first and nothing to be second. In vain, then, all the effort, ridiculous the privation, senseless the hopes of weeks, months, years. “All the labor, the privation, the agony — for what?” writes Scott in his diary. “For nothing but dreams that now have their end.” Tears come to their eyes, for all their fatigue they cannot sleep that night. Sullenly, hopelessly, like condemned men they make their final approach to Pole that they had imagined to storm in triumph. None tries to console the other, wordlessly they drag onward. On January 18 Captain Scott reaches the Pole with his companions. No longer blinded by the feat of having been first, he can only mark the sadness of the landscape with dull eyes. “There’s nothing to see here, nothing that would set it apart from the horrible monotony of the last few days.” That is the entire description that Robert F. Scott gives of the South Pole. The only extraordinary thing they find there comes not from nature but from enemy hands: Amundsen’s tent with the Norwegian flag, which flutters in impudent victory over the stormed ramparts of man. A letter from the conquistador awaits whomsoever might follow him to that place, requesting him to forward it to King Hakon of Norway. Scott takes it on himself to fulfill this hardest of duties: to serve as the world’s witness to someone else's accomplishment, which he had so striven to make his own.

With sadness they plant the English flag, the “belated Union Jack”, next to Amundsen’s victory banner. Then they depart from the “traitorous home to their ambitions”, the wind following them coldly. With prophetic doubt Scott writes in his diary, “I dread the way back.”

The march home is beset by ten times the danger. On the trip to the pole the compass had pointed the way. But now on their return they have to be careful not to lose sight of their own footprints--not a single time over the course of weeks — lest they fail to find the depots where food awaits them, along with clothing and the supply of warmth provided by two gallons of petroleum. When snowdrifts block their sight they are overcome by distress, for stepping off the path would lead straight to certain death. Their bodies have already lost the freshness they had at the outset, when they were warmed by the abundance of nourishment and the energy it gave them, and by the heated quarters of their antarctic abode. And now the will’s resilience starts to slacken in their breast. On the way to the Pole their heroic force had been stretched taught by the notion that all mankind’s longing and thirst for knowledge might be embodied in their flesh. Awareness of their immortal deed had made them superhuman in strength. But now they merely struggle to get out of there unscathed, to preserve their bodily, their mortal existence, so that they may make their homecoming — an inglorious homecoming that they might even dread.

It is a terrible thing to read the diary entries from those days. The weather becomes increasingly hostile, winter sets in unusually early, the soft snow grows crusty beneath their shoes, trapping their feet as in a snare, and the frost beats down their exhausted bodies. It is a small cause for celebration every time they reach a depot after days of drifting and hesitation; every time their words flicker with a fleeting spark of hope. Nothing testifies better to the intellectual heroism of this small group of men than that here, in the immense emptiness, within a hair's breadth of annihilation, Wilson, the researcher, resumes his scientific observations. And that he adds another pound of rare stones to his own sled, freighted though it is with vital burdens.

But gradually human courage succumbs to the supremacy nature, a supremacy that now, relentlessly, steeled by millennia, summons its every means of ruin upon the five daring men: cold, frost, snow and wind. The feet, long since chafed, and the body, long since weakened by insufficient rations that do not provide the warmth it needs, begin to fail. With horror the companions discover one day that Evans, the strongest of them, suddenly starts doing strange things. He tarries behind, complains incessantly of real and imagined things. With a shudder they understand from his ramblings that the ill-fated man has gone mad as a result of a fall or some torturous pain. What to do with him? Leave him in the icy desert? They must reach the depot without delay, otherwise… Scott himself hesitates to spell it out in his diary. On the night of February 17, at 1 o’clock, the hapless officer dies, barely one day’s march from “Camp Slaughterhouse”, where an abundant meal awaits them at last, provided by the ponies they massacred months before.

Now the four of them resume the march, but catastrophically the next depot brings bitter disappointments of its own. It has to little oil, and that means that they ration its use down to the bare minimum, to economize on warmth, their only defense against the frost. They spend an ice-cold night shaken about by storms and wake up in low spirits. They barely have the strength to pull the felt shoes over their feet. But they drag themselves onwards. One of them, Oates, walking on toes that are already being frozen off. The wind blows more keenly than ever before, and in the next Depot, on March 2, cruel disappointment returns: again there is too little oil.

Now fear begins to penetrate Scott’s writing. It is evident how he strives to hold back his dread, but one shrill and desperate desperate cry after the other pushes its way through is forced calm: “It cannot go on like this”, or “God be with us! We are no longer equal to this struggle”, or “our play shall have a tragic end”, and finally the harrowing realization: “If only providence would help us! We have nothing more to hope from other men.” But they drag themselves farther and farther, without hope, with clenched teeth. Oates can no longer keep up; he is more a burden than a help to his friends. They have to delay the advance when the noon temperature hits -43 degrees, and the doomed man knows that he is delivering ruin to his friends. Now they ready themselves for the worst. Wilson, the researcher, hands out ten tablets of morphine to each man to hasten their end, should the need arise. They try one last day of marching with the sick man. Then the hapless man himself asks them to leave him behind in his sleeping bag and try their fate on their own. They protest vehemently, even though it is clear to them that his suggestion spells their relief. The sick man staggers another few miles, his legs frozen, to the next outpost. They pass the night, and look out the next morning to see a hurricane raging.

Oates suddenly gets up. “I am going to take a little walk”, he says to his friends, “I might be out for a while”. The others tremble. Everyone knows what this tour means. But no one dares utter a word to hold him back. No one dares offer him their hand in farewell, but watch with awe as cavalry captain Lawrence J. E. Oates of the Inniskilling Dragoons goes to face a hero’s death.

Three tired and weakened men trudge through the endless desert of steely ice, tired tired and hopeless. Only a blunt sense of self-preservation keeps their sinews moving in a faltering gait. The weather grows ever worse. New disappointments mock them at every Depot — always too little oil and warmth. On March 21 they are still about 12 miles out from the next Depot, but the wind blows with such murderous violence, that they are unable to leave their tent. Every evening they hope to reach the next destination on the following day, but their rations and their last hopes disappear all the while. There is no more oil, and the thermometer reads […] Every hope extinguishes. All they have now is the choice of death by hunger or by frost. For with days these three men fight off the in… end in a small tent in the white expanses. On March 29 they know that not even a miracle can save them. And so they decide not to take any measures against their doom, but to proudly await it along with any other misfortunes they may encounter. They crawl into their sleeping bags, and of their final sufferings not a single sigh has ever made its way back to the world of men.

In these moments, lonely before that death which, though sightless, dwelt as near as their very breath, while outside the hurricane rushed like a raving man at the thin fabric of the tents, Captain Scott thinks of all whose life is bound together with his. Alone amidst this most icy silence, never before met by the breath of man, he grows heroically aware of the brotherhood he shares with his country, indeed with all of humanity. His mind conjures forth, into this white desert, the images of all those who through love, loyalty and friendship were ever close to him. And he addresses them with words. With stiffening fingers, in the hour of his death, Captain Scott writes letters to all the living whom he loves.

These letters are a marvel. In the powerful presence of death, they dispense with triviality - and they seem pervaded by the crystalline air of this inanimate heaven. They are addressed to men, and yet they speak to all mankind. Though written within time they speak for eternity.

He writes to his wife. He exhorts her to look after the great legacy that is his son, most of all to guard him from laxity. And, at the end of one of the most sublime achievements of world history, he reveals something about himself, “As you know, I had to force myself to be ambitious…I always tended toward indolence.” Within inches of his demise he still boasts of, rather than regrets, his own resolve: “How much I could tell you of this expedition. And how much better it were sitting in the comfort of our home!”

And he writes with the most loyal fellowship to his wife and to the mother of his fellows in suffering, who have gone to their death with him, as testimony to their heroism. Himself dying, he consoles those left behind by his companions with his great and even superhuman sense of the greatness of the moment, of the import of this failed enterprise.

And he writes to his friends. Modest of his own deeds, but full of glorious pride for the entire nation, whose worthy son he enthusiastically deems himself to be in this hour: “I do not know whether I have been a great discoverer”, he acknowledges, “but our end will testify, that the bold spirit and the power to overcome have not disappeared from our race.” And that which preserved his rigor and purity of soul for his whole life, this profession of friendship is now wrenched from his hand by death. “I have never met a man in my life,” he writes to his best friend, “that I so admired and loved as you, but I could never show you what your friendship meant for me. Because you had so much to give, and I had nothing to give you in return.”

And he writes one last letter, the finest of them all, to the English nation. He feels obliged to account for why he, through no fault of his own, failed in his battle for the glory of England. He goes through the individual events that conspired against him, and adds a marvelous pathos to the echo of death in his call to all Britons never to neglect those who remain. His last thought transcends his own fate. His last word speaks, not of his own death, but of the life of men he does not know: “For God’s sake, look after our survivors!” After that, the sheet is blank.

Up to the very moment that the pen slid from his too frozen fingers Scott kept his diary. He found the strength for this superhuman deed in the hope that these pages would be found next to his corpse—these pages that would testify to both his courage and that of the English race. His fingers, already in the process of freezing, note his wish: “Send this diary to my wife!” But then his hand, with horrible clarity, crosses out “my wife”, and writes above it, terribly, “my widow”.

For weeks the companions had waited in the hut. First full of hope, then with mild concern and finally with growing anxiety. Expeditions were sent out twice to give aid but they were whipped back by the weather. Without their leader they helplessly abide the entire Winter as the black shadow of catastrophe falls over their hearts. During these months Captain Robert Scott’s fate and deeds are enveloped in snow and silence. The ice seals them in a glassy coffin. Only on October 29, during the Polar Spring, can the Expedition set out, if only to find the corpses of the heroes and their reports. On November 12 they reach the tent. They find the bodies of the heroes frozen in their sleeping bags: Scott, in death still holding Wilson in a brotherly embrace. They find the letters and documents and prepare a grave for the tragic heroes. A simple, solitary, black cross juts out of a snow pile and upwards into the white world that forever hides beneath it the witness of that heroic feat of mankind.

But no! Unexpectedly and fantastically their acts are resurrected—the miracle of our modern technological world! The friends bring the plates and films home—they set their images free in a chemical bath—ad once again they see Scott and his companions wandering through the polar landscape that apart from them only Amundsen had ever seen. The messages of there reports and letters are sent by electronic cable to an astonished world, in whose imperial cathedral the king bends his knee to the heroes’ memories. And though it seemed useless, to make of this failed end a call for mankind to steel themselves once again for the unachievable. In magnificent response to this ruined venture, out from a heroic death the rises a new life that will try infinity. What follows mere success is simply ambition; but nothing raises the heart with such glory as when man falls in his battle against he indomitable power of fate, this greatest tragedy of all, which in some elevates the mind to poetry, but shapes the lives of thousands.